The purpose of the research is to construct and validate a taxonomy of nursing interventions for use in practice, eduction, and research. It is anticipated that the resulting taxonomy will contain approximately 350 nursing intervention labels organized at 3-4 levels of abstraction. the lowest level will include the largest number of labels and will be the level most often used by practicing nurses to describe their work. Each label will have an accompanying set of activities that will operationally define what one does to carry out the intervention. The research will address two questions: 1) What are the interventions that nurses use? and 2) How are nursing interventions related or classified? An overview of the specific steps of this research include: Phase I 1) identification and resolution of the conceptual and methodological issues involved; 2) generation of an initial list of interventions; 3) refinement of the intervention list and defining activities; Phase II 4) arrangement of the intervention list in an initial taxonomic structure and articulation of the rules and principles governing the structure 5) validation of the intervention labels, defining activities and taxonomy. Steps 1 and 2 of Phase I have been accomplished. In Phase I, nursing activities listed in current nursing textbooks and other sources are grouped using content analysis and intervention labels assigned to groups. Content validity is assessed through adaptation of Fehring's methodology. In Phase II, the intervention labels will be rated by groups of nurses on how similar they are and multi-dimensional scaling and hierarchial cluster analyses will be done on the ratings. The results of this work will be the first validated taxonomy of nursing interventions.